“Won’t we all,” she said, and laughed, a surprisingly coarse sound. “As it happens, we’re on our way there ourselves. Not by choice, you understand, but it’s the nearest habitation for miles, and bad trade is better than none, in my opinion.”

“You’re, uh, welcome to travel with us,” Fledermaus said. “The road doesn’t go to the town but it passes nearby, or, uh, more correctly it fades as it nears the outpost. Or so it was the last time we’ve come this way.”

The Stranger considered the two of them. At last he nodded, and the woman, Titania, took the reins and cracked them, and the two piebald donkeys began to pull the wagon without complaining, slow and sedate, as though they had all the time in the world. Fledermaus continued to draw on his pipe, and Titania hummed the same few bars of some wordless tune the Stranger didn’t recognise. He spurred his own horse, walking alongside them, and the other horses followed behind—though he noticed they gave the wagon itself a wide berth, and walked some distance from it by the side of the road, on which they seemed reluctant to step at all.

Overhead, the sky’s hues deepened by degree, from azure to ultramarine; as the sun traversed the sky, the travellers cast sfumato shadows, which lengthened as they trailed their originators like furtive ghosts. The road itself changed with the light, growing in turns ivory and snow, ghost-white and smoky, until the Stranger found it easier to not look directly at the road at all, but ahead.

“You came from out west?” he said.

“That we did,” Titania said.

“I saw signs of a battle there, six, seven days back, on the horizon.”

“That is, uh, true,” Fledermaus said. “Yes. Yes. We think. We were still some distance away and when we saw the coming storm we sought shelter.”

“We reached the place a day and a night later,” Titania said. “After the battle had moved on. But we are not scavengers, stranger. We didn’t dally there.”

“You found nothing of value?”

He saw them exchange a glance, though what it meant, if anything, he didn’t know.

“What is of value to some is of no value to, uh, others,” Fledermaus said.

“We do not trade in substance or materiel,” his sister said.

The sun had dipped low in the sky when they caught sight of a dwelling in the distance. As they came closer, they saw it was an abandoned chapel. The weathered stone was dirty with dust, and the broken windows gaped open like empty eye sockets. Over the steeple, only, there remained a stylized balloon painted a vivid red, and it swallowed the reflected light of the sun. The travellers, by unspoken consent, halted there, near the old church.

“A strange place for a mission,” the Stranger said.